The car-bomb explosion rocked downtown Phoenix and spilled newspaper reporter Don Bolles’ twisted body onto the hot pavement. As Bolles lay dying, he whispered to a passerby who had rushed to his aid, “They finally got me.” The unwritten law of the underworld – never kill a newsman – had been broken and all hell broke loose.

In the Wild West days of the 1970s – when millions were being made in land fraud and stock speculation, gambling, drugs and contract killings – Bolles was a crusading investigative reporter with a lot of powerful enemies. Mafia chieftains from New York, Chicago and Detroit had “retired” to Arizona. Mexican heroin moving north through Tucson and Phoenix flooded cities in the Northeast. The sale of worthless desert land to unsuspecting seniors was a national scandal. And Bolles knew something about all of it.

The question of who really killed Bolles still smolders almost 30 years after the June 2, 1976, bombing.

So complex were the conspiracies to kill Bolles – and later the button-man who strapped the dynamite to the newsman’s Nissan – that only one of the dozen or so people thought to be involved in the intersecting plots remains in prison. The reputed mastermind of the assassination – a millionaire liquor distributor who straddled the underworld and its respectable veneer – died before he could be brought to justice. Many believe the whole story has yet to be told.

Law enforcement turf wars and outright corruption have left loose ends that a few die-hard investigators are working to tie up. The explosion that killed Bolles had exposed a state rotten to its core. In response to this climate of corruption, a group of Bolles’ colleagues from newspapers around the country descended on Phoenix shortly after his death, intent on tearing the place apart, figuratively. They were a hard-charging, hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble crew – led by New York Newsday’s legendary Bob Greene – itching to bring down every wrongdoer in the state. They came from the Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Denver Post – 38 journalists from 28 newspapers and television stations in all.

The unprecedented project in which otherwise fierce competitors cooperated to carry on Bolles’ crusade yielded an 80,000-word series that ran in newspapers around the country, launched widespread reforms and swelled the ranks of the newly formed Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., now one of journalism’s most respected organizations.

The passage of time has done little to quiet the nagging concerns of law enforcement and news media investigators. “Murder of a Newsman” explores the lingering impact of this dramatic daylight murder of an American newsman. The one-hour documentary blends contemporary interviews of investigators, journalists and key players – including some conspirators who have been released from prison or who have emerged from the federal witness protection program – with extensive archival footage of the bombing and its aftermath.

SimonPure Senior Producer Geoffrey F.X. O’Connell was Editor of the Phoenix alternative newsweekly New Times in the 1970s. Bolles was just blocks from the Phoenix Press Club where he was on his way to a lunch meeting with O’Connell and several other journalists. In the months following, O’Connell consulted with The Los Angeles Times and CBS News, as well as conducting his own coverage of the event and its implications. O’Connell published the Arizona Project series after Bolles’ own paper backed away from its controversial findings and no-holds-barred approach to prominent Arizona politicians and businessmen.